Pocahontas Loves John Smith?

By Jay Parini

Published: September 30, 2001

ARGALL

By William T. Vollmann.

Illustrated. 746 pp. New York:

Viking. $40.

One would have to wonder about the audience for ''Argall,'' a 700-plus-page novel about Pocahontas and John Smith written in pseudo-Elizabethan prose, even were it not hugely digressive. But William T. Vollmann's latest book, the fourth in a projected series of ''seven dreams'' about the European settling of North America, presents a peculiar challenge. Even the quotations from early texts are made to seem as old and odd as possible. (''I have frequently archaized quotations for this book,'' the author tells us in one of his zillion footnotes.) This was a bad idea, I suspect.

The vaguely parodic prose (one is never quite sure what is meant as a joke and what is meant as an attempt at straight linguistic shooting) veers off in the opening sentences, spoken by William the Blind, a mythic version of William T. (for The?) Vollmann: ''I fear to compound my first offense, in penning such slender and tuneless lines as these, by presuming to direct them to yourself, particularly when their subject is a mere Wilderness of insignificant Salvages. For what could bulk more worthy of our puzzlings (save THE ALMIGHTIE Himself), than the hives of GODliness we call Cities?''

I suppose readers exist who enjoy this sort of thing, with its false etymologies, obvious puns, forced archaisms and self-indulgent digressions. In fact, I found myself amused at many points, and generally awed by Vollmann's mad energy. His excursions into narrative backwaters, here as elsewhere in his fiction, can fascinate, as when we hear about John Smith's encounter with a stingray (''A rarely triangular fish he's speared! No one's seen the like.'') Yet one is exhausted after a while, and somewhat benumbed by Page 442, when the writer's linguistic juggernaut keeps plowing the same old waters: ''And so in September (having made his course .50. leagues northward of the Azores), there sailed upon the Virginian scene our sharp-hearted Captaine Argall, laden with guns & news. What hap there? Well, kind Reader, let the trumpet of History sound, to form up our worthy Adventurers into a procession in time.''

Doubtless Vollmann has some postmodern idea about history that he hopes to convey. It's an idea quite shopworn by now and tediously repeated by novelists nowadays: history is fiction, one cannot quite know what happened so one might as well invent it, and so forth. Another of the many sons of Tom (Pynchon) and Don (DeLillo), Vollmann has over the past decade been assembling an epic from the shards of American history. He has got all the mannerisms right: the endless detail, which ''stands in'' for reality; the fractured narrative, which vigorously undermines linearity; the jazzy prose, which undermines the usual expectations for words to cohere in a relatively static plane of diction. His novels attempt to look encyclopedic, since choosing any one fact over another seems hubristic.

One can certainly applaud Vollmann's obsessive interest in history, and laud the work he's done. His projected sequence began with ''The Ice-Shirt'' (1990), wherein he turned the searchlight of his imagination on the 10th century, when the first explorers ventured toward the New World. With a psychological shrewdness evident in all his fiction, Vollmann began his own ''dream'' of Vinland's founding by Norse marauders with a lively account of family feuds in Norway -- a fit of bile ferried westward by characters like Eirik the Red. (One thinks of Milton's Satan: ''Which way I fly is Hell; Myself am hell.'') ''Fathers and Crows'' (1992) was a rich, if clotted, stew of history focused on the French Jesuits and the Iroquois. Set in the 17th century, the novel (narrated by William the Blind, as ever) teemed with geographical details and wearisome historical summaries. With a mania for diversion, the novelist offered more than 40 pages on the life of St. Ignatius Loyola, a digression supposedly justified by the fact that many of his characters were Jesuits. ''The Rifles'' (1994) was similarly digressive and bloated; it concerned an ill-starred attempt by Sir John Franklin to locate the Northwest Passage. Yet each of these novels could boast thrilling passages and provocative associations.

''Argall'' seems the least successful novel in the sequence, partly because the language is endlessly distracting and often silly, as in the following:

''Pocahontas, my dearling! How d'ye do?

''Passing well, Father, excepting that I see you but scantly. This day I'm joyous that you've returned again. . . .

''She wore a painted mantle & a chain of some white beads which he did once give her. Her face & shoulders shone bloodlike with puccoon-paint. 'Twas passing strange for to see her not naked. He would have joyed to find her bare.''

Everyone in Jamestown, it seems, would ''joy'' to see poor Pocahontas bare. (One recalls Vollmann's fascination with whores -- an obsession that disfigures several of his novels, most recently ''The Royal Family.'') I suspect Vollmann is right, however, to juxtapose the colonial impulse with the sexual impulse: the urge to dominate adds the post to colonial. Yet I never felt the kind of sympathy for Pocahontas one might expect from such an extravaganza as ''Argall.''

There are too many plot lines here, and they tangle. In trying to imagine what the lives of Pocahontas and John Smith might have been like, the novelist burrows feverishly -- into the dirt of British history, the geography of Virginia, the real or imagined sins of Powhatan, father of Pocahontas, and her uncle, Opechancanough -- an arrestingly vengeful figure. One meets such Jamestown legends as Gov. John Ratcliffe and Lt. George Percy -- both given to genocidal impulses. Most menacing is Capt. Samuel Argall, who kidnaps Pocahontas, reduces Indian villages to rubble and initiates black slavery in the New World.

Would that Vollmann had known what to do with this rich material, much of it quarried from an array of scholarly and historical sources, all footnoted in mock-scholarly fashion. (Like Eliot's footnotes to ''The Waste Land,'' these notes are slightly parodic, even arch, giving an aura of scholarship, a sense of high-toned commentary.)

''Softly passed like rats the magical hours of her oppressment,'' Vollmann writes of Pocahontas's ordeal. The reader's ''oppressment'' will not pass so softly. On the other hand, having read ''Argall,'' I was prompted to return to John Smith's marvelous ''Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles'' (1624), which was obviously a major source for Vollmann. A book could have worse consequences.

Jay Parini, a poet and novelist, teaches literature at Middlebury College. His sixth novel, ''The Apprentice Lover,'' will be published next spring.